Dahlia Lithwick Rewrite Challenge 2007

In Monday’s edition of Slate, Dahlia Lithwick penned a column in which she described how a conservative journalist had taken a piece Lithwick had written about the Duke lacrosse rape scandal and used it to set up a straw-man argument about the liberal rush to judgment. The original article, in fact, made the argument that everyone was rushing to judgment.

So, how did Allen turn this into a hysterical men-are-pigs “hanging party”? She just cut and pasted until she’d rewritten the column to say it. Where I had referred to “mounds and mounds of significant physical evidence”—listing both exculpatory and inculpatory evidence, and highlighting the ways in which they conflicted—Allen inserted her own language to have me claim there were ” ‘[m]ounds and mounds of significant physical evidence’ that a rape had occurred.”

Lithwick then invited her readers to rewrite the same column in a slightly different way:

So, I turn to you, my readers, to help me invent a new Imaginary Right-Wing Hack. And I’m asking you to start with that bilious conservative wing nut, Dahlia Lithwick, whose April 22 column on the Duke rape case was a full-bore assault on women and minorities, and a stunning piece of right-wing vitriol to boot. Make free with the cut and paste functions, and please don’t be afraid of those ellipses … Rewrite the column as Ann Coulter channeling Bill O’Reilly . . .

I took this challenge on, thinking that it would be an amusing exercise. I used entire original phrases and sentences where possible, in order to make the resulting piece convincing. Where it wasn’t possible, I swiped individual words and made my own sentences up. But each and every word is Lithwick’s, though my version bears about as much resemblance to her original column as Frankenstein’s monster bore to Abby Normal.

When I sent this in to Ms. Lithwick, I said in my cover letter, “Having finished, I am embarrassed by my own handiwork. This has been an interesting lesson in the finer points of distortion.” I will post it here because I promised to, and because I do feel it is an interesting lesson. But please know that I feel slightly dirty having written it.
Read the original column first for comparison!

Now my version:

The Duke lacrosse team’s rape scandal cuts . . .this country . . .
deeply. It reaffirms everyone’s deep-seated . . . suspicions . . . that . . .
white men . . . can’t get a fair shake under our legal system. This
case will be chewed over, regurgitated, and chewed over again by
television pundits unafraid of venturing opinions in no way informed
or changed by the . . . facts.

This is . . [in] [p]art . . a case about consent[;] . . . it . . is
. . . seemingly . . . a classic “he says/she says.”. . . [S]ome truths
are . . . subjective . . . Subtle distinctions between consensual sex and
date rape, between coercion and force, between silences that sound
like “yes” and silences that sound like “stop,” are difficult for . . .
women . . . themselves to work out. How can a juror really divine
what went on in the mind of another person? . . .

[A]fter the Kobe Bryant accusations surfaced[,] [p]eople made instant
judgments—based on their own experiences, or what they read in the
paper. . . Women who had never even heard of Kobe Bryant knew
absolutely that he was a rapist . . . And that’s what’s happening in the
Duke case . . . A Duke English professor has called for the university
to expel the whole lacrosse team to stop the “drunken white male
privilege loosed amongst us” . . . Jesse Jackson, knowing nothing [but]
. . . rank speculation . . . is comfortable saying this is an archetypal
racial conflict. [B]ut . . . [w]e already . . . know . . . the truth,
with great certainty. [T]his nameless accuser. . . is . . . lying . . .

. . . [T]his case . . . [is] about sex and race and power. But it’s
. . . about social messages [and] identity-based misunderstandings . . .
as well . . . Either a . . . rape, kidnapping, and strangulation happened
in that bathroom in Durham or it didn’t . . . [T]here is evidence here:
Mounds and mounds of significant physical evidence . . .One might hope
that all this evidence, and the unambiguous legal charges, would lead
to reasonable legal inferences and unequivocal legal conclusions. But
that is where we’d be dead wrong. Because the so-called objective
“evidence” currently being meticulously weighed and evaluated by the
media is no more “objective” or “conclusive” than the . . . rapidly
changing . . . accounts of . . . the . . . accuser . . . Pick your fact,
any fact. Each of them . . . dismisses . . . the alleged . . . rape . . .
This scandal has become yet another exercise in fiction-writing as
opposed to truth-seeking; we can use the . . . evidence to confirm
what we already know . . . to be true. [T]he accused students . . .
are . . . innocent.

Mom said,

How scary. Maybe this explains how my students are able to paraphrase me in exams or papers and get my ideas so wildly wrong, sometimes. Except they’re not doing it with malice or with a hate-filled agenda – they’ve just taken bad notes.

Australian comedian Charles Firth actually created several fictitious blogging personas, including a right-wing blogger named Edward McGuire (complete with wikipedia entry). He got taken seriously and was endorsed by other conservative commentators. (He’s written a book about it called _American Hoax_.)

About

I write. I knit. I kvetch. Lately, I’ve been endeavoring to undermine the patriarchy while simultaneously making a sweater. If I succeed, I will nominate myself for the Guinness Book of World Records and then throw a party.
I can be e-mailed at ucc3llina at gmail dot com.